Dipping Your Toes into Summer Entertainment

June 12th, 2015

Everything old is new again this summer, as many familiar characters and beloved titles — some more than 50 years old — returning to the silver screen.

That means superheroes, of course, and so summer officially began with “Avengers: Age of Ultron” on May 1st with James Spader as Ultron, a villainous techno-wizard, and continues with “Ant-Man” and “Fantastic Four.”

But we’ll also see sequels to Seth MacFarlane’s “Ted,” the rom-com “Pitch Perfect” and the Channing Tatum’s “Magic Mike.” Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” gets a new installment making its nationwide debut today; “Poltergeist” Spielberg’s 1982 classic about a suburban haunted house is also getting an update this summer. George Miller, the action-pulp auteur behind the “Mad Max” franchise, delivers a revival, starring Tom Hardy in the title role.

“Terminator: Genisys” brings us back to 1984 — the year of the first film’s release. And yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger is in this. The end of July sees “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation” starring Tom Cruise as agent Ethan Hunt, who must prove that the nefarious Syndicate is real.

In the wake of hits like “Bridesmaids” and “The Heat,” we’ll see a strong showing of leading women-fronted comedies this summer. Reese Witherspoon plays a cop in “Hot Pursuit,” Melissa McCarthy joins the CIA with “Spy” and Amy Schumer takes the spotlight in “Trainwreck.”

On the animated side of things, “Minions” – the little yellow babblers from the “Despicable Me” films get their own feature, and a new supervillain, Scarlet Overkill voiced by Sandra Bullock in July.

Movies not your thing? Perhaps you are holding out for the July release of Harper Lee’s eagerly anticipated Go Set a Watchman which features many of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird some twenty years later as Scout will “grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand both her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood”. Go Set a Watchman, completed in the mid-50s but lost for more than half a century, was written before To Kill a Mockingbird. After reading Go Set a Watchman, Lee’s editor advised her to write a story from the perspective of Scout as a child. The resulting novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, went on to win the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, after which Lee was silent for more than 50 years.